NVIDIA to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93B
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NVIDIA has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.93 billion, aiming to scale the open-source model repository's platform and infrastructure and expand AI access for developers, engineers, and research institutions. Hugging Face reportedly hosts over three million models and serves more than 18 million developers and 200,000 companies. NVIDIA stated that Hugging Face will remain an open, hardware-neutral platform, allowing developers to choose models, frameworks, clouds, and compute, with NVIDIA hardware not required. Jensen Huang emphasized support for open-weight models and distributed development as a way to broaden AI access. Hugging Face co-founder Julien Chaumond said NVIDIA was the only partner seriously considered due to Huang's defense of open-source AI. The company will retain its independent brand and existing team, with NVIDIA focusing on improving repository reliability, safety, evaluation, inference, and deployment infrastructure. NVIDIA is already the largest contributor of open models and data to the platform, with over 500 open models.
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